Software installation on modern Ubuntu

[Nrbrtx]

Dear Ubuntu developers!

I'm using Debian since 3.1 and using Ubuntu since 6.06.
So let me write about installing programs.

As far I can understand here were two methods of software installation:
1. apt (apt-get), dpkg, aptitude - for advanced users
2. synaptic and Ubuntu software-center - for newbies.

Nowadays gnome-software and mate-welcome were added to the newbies' list.
But they have very small lists of software.
Ubuntu software-center was great, but its development was dropped.


What we have as result?

There is only one mature and functional software manager. It is named
*Synaptic*.
But ... it works very strange. I talk about Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (!) here.
I do not know why you migrated apt-xapian-index to Python3. This migration
is incomplete and buggy (see bug 1612948
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1612948>).
Almost everytime when I open Synaptic it says "Rebuilding search index". We
have bug about this (see bug 1685376
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1685376>). It takes a lot of time even on
SSD (on HDD it is really painful). I launched Synaptic to find some package
by name, or description, or section, or status and I always need to wait
when it finished rebuilding index.
If I try to download changelog of some package it complains about
privileges (see bug 1522675 <https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1522675>).
It shows duplicate entries for packages, installed from various origins
(see bug 1533554 <https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1533554>).

So if you can please fix all aforementioned bugs in Synaptic and its
friends (apt and apt-xapian-index).
Synaptic is essential package, it is like aptitude on server, but it is on
desktop.
For such package every bug which made user's life harder should be fixed as
soon as possible by maintainers or upstream developers. Time for SRU should
be minimal.




With best regards,
Norbert.
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